Introduction

The road to digital transformation can take many different routes, and each organization's journey will be different. Given the major resource constraints that most companies are facing today, weighing the tradeoffs necessary to bring digital transformation to life is critical for success. With more and more organizations going digital and reaping the benefits in plenty, your organization tasks you with charting a plan to help them go digital. After many detailed deliberations, you and your team decide on going digital with a phygital approach. (If you’re still deciding on an approach to go digital, check out our blog on how phygital may be the best approach to going digital) With the approach decided, you’re now faced with 2 broad questions before your organization is on its way toward a digital future:

1. Whether you should go for end-to-end transformation or not?
2. Who should you trust for a successful digital transformation?

Businesses need to plan their digital transformation pathways methodically to unlock value and maximize their limited resources. While some might choose a series of incremental changes, others might opt for a radical, end-to-end transformation path. But which is the right path for your organization? What should be your considerations to choose the right way forward?

Let us begin by discussing both of your requirements.

Who should choose End-to-end transformation?

With almost everyone talking about the positive change brought about in their organization after an end-to-end transformation, you may be eager to choose to go down the same route. However, an end-to-end transformation may not suit everyone’s requirements. You should choose an end-to-end transformation if you want to -

1. Avoid dealing with multiple vendors, projects, and approvals - Irrespective of its scale, even a single transformation project is extremely tedious and involves cultural re-alignment, increased collaboration, and change management. If your organization is ready to handle this intensity of change at once, then an end-to-end transformation would suit your requirements.
2. Experience the benefits of getting your entire organization digital in one go – Taking an end-to-end approach allows companies to adapt faster to volatile market conditions and maximize profits. For example, digital processes and data analytics can help unlock capacity by increasing yield and throughput while reducing costs.
3. Unify Customer Experiences - Without end-to-end transformation, your customers may face experiences that aren’t cohesive, increasing the chances of them having a bad customer experience. To deliver experiences that satisfy your customers’ increasing preference for digital experiences, an end-to-end transformation may be better suited to you.

While these reasons may convince you to go for an end-to-end transformation, the partial or siloed approach comes with its own set of strengths, which may be better suited to your organization instead.

Who should choose Partial Transformation?

For the longest time, the process of going digital involved the organization working and consulting with multiple vendors for transforming each department. While this may seem very counter-intuitive in an era where end-to-end transformation has become more popular than ever, this method is better suited for certain requirements. You should choose an end-to-end transformation if you want -

Increased Flexibility - Depending on your organization’s appetite for risk, you may prefer to take the piecemeal approach to roll out your digital transformation plan. The partial approach allows the organization to implement digital transformation to a single function and gauge its benefits and drawbacks to decide whether or not to continue on the path and gives them the ability to tweak the strategy as per the previous transition’s performance. On the other hand, going end-to-end puts the company at risk of large-scale problems if the transition is not done properly and fails across various departments. So, if your organization prefers to take a safer, less risky approach to this transition, then going one department at a time will be better suited to you.

Faster time-to-market - Choosing to go for an end-to-end approach puts an organization in a locked-in position where it has to wait for a relatively long period for the transition to get completed, and then a little while longer for the results to show. On the other hand, it takes much less time to take a single department digital and then monitor its results. If your organization would prefer to spend relatively lesser time to get an idea of whether a digital transformation works, then an individual function transition might be better suited for you.

Relatively lesser cost - If your organization would prefer to put in a smaller quantum of investment into going digital to test its feasibility, then going piecemeal on the transformation lets you do just that without putting in everything at once into an end-to-end transition and then hoping that it works out.

Comparison of Partial and End-to-end Transformation

Partial TransformationEnd-to-end TransformationIncreased FlexibilityUnified Customer ExperiencesFaster time-to-marketImproved Data SynergyRelatively cheaperEnhanced ProductivityEasier per-project company alignmentIncreased interdepartmental collaboration

Choosing a partner that can deliver both

Once you choose a path toward your Digital Business Transformation, you’re left with the final decision to make: Whom to rely on to get you to the digital finish line? While it might seem like choosing to go for a specialist for a specific function would get you more expertise, more and more people agree that going with an end-to-end transformation vendor delivers results more consistently. But what if you didn’t have to choose? Choosing a vendor that can provide both means that you’re trusting someone who has the expertise to transform individual functions, as well as the wholesome perspective from digital strategy to implementation and support. This means that you get access to someone who is an expert at both ideation and execution. Here are the benefits of going with a vendor that can do both individual functions and end-to-end transformation.

1. Seamless experience – When you work with a firm that provides end-to-end solutions, you have the benefit of experiencing a seamless transition where your existing business processes are not disturbed while they are transforming. This is specifically relevant for organizations that have already invested in legacy systems that are critical to business continuity.

2. Easier collaboration - Working with multiple vendors and getting them to collaborate to ensure that the transformed departments can work with one another is extremely challenging. Choosing a firm that offers solutions from strategy to support ensures easier collaboration and smoother business transformation.

3. Singular accountability - Working with multiple vendors means that if anything goes wrong with the transformation project, holding any one vendor accountable would become nearly impossible due to the interlinking of all work and the results that follow. On the other hand, choosing a vendor that offers individual function and end-to-end means that in case of any shortcoming in the transformation or its results, you have a single point of accountability, and that vendor can easily map the weakness in the business transformation process to make tweaks for improvement.

After reading this, if you too are looking for a firm that can offer both end-to-end and individual function transformation, we, at Digile, would love to help you out. We have carried out successful digital business transformations of various scales for all sizes of clients. Our Digital solutions have helped our clients realize their hidden potential and experience tremendous growth.

Visit our website to check our suite of digital services and get in touch with us to discuss your requirements.

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